Scentsy Thrives With EMC VNX and FAST

EMC Corporation
announced that Scentsy Group, a
company dedicated to creating a social shopping experience, is using EMC VNX unified
storage to manage
expansion of its goal of a 100% virtualized information infrastructure.

With a three-year revenue growth rate from 2007 to 2010 of 2,904%, Scentsy
relies on EMC VNX with a flash 1st implementation to achieve
performance and operational efficiencies using FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage
Tiering for Virtual Pools), FAST Cache, and a tiered-drive architecture with flash drives. Scentsy is also leveraging EMC backup and recovery solutions and
VMware vSphere, View 4.5 and vCenter virtualization and cloud infrastructure
solutions to provide a solution for its
growing IT infrastructure.

Customer Benefits:

• 
  Performance: Since moving to VNX and
  employing a flash 1st architecture, Scentsy has achieved a 30% performance
  increase of its virtualized infrastructure.
• Efficiency: The FAST Suite
  ensures Scentsy’s data is tiered to the most
  cost-effective drive capacity (e.g. SAS or NL-SAS) based on its pre-defined
  policies.
• Simplicity: Integration between VNX
  and VMware enable Scentsy to provide 10 new virtual desktops in 30 minutes or
  less-compared to what used to take weeks using physical PCs.
• Streamlined Backups: With
  Avamar, Scentsy can backup its virtualized infrastructure in just a few hours
  each night-compared to more than 24 hours with their previous solution.
• Savings: Since implementing a
  virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) strategy, Scentsy has seen a savings of
  30-50% in physical hardware costs.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
Scentsy faced IT infrastructure scalability challenges as it experienced
business growth. To help manage this growth, it adopted VMware
virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. It implemented VMware View 4.5, vCenter
and vSphere to manage its virtual servers and virtual desktops. At the same
time, Scentsy was looking to increase the performance of its storage
environment.

After extensive vendor evaluations, the company standardized on VNX unified
storage with FAST Cache and FAST VP.
Additionally, EMC RecoverPoint software provides automated replication between
two VNX systems located at data centers 1,600 miles apart for DR. Scentsy also
implemented a new backup solution with Avamar deduplication backup software
and systems to backup its entire virtual infrastructure.

Louie Smith, System Administrator, Scentsy, said: "I really like that VNX lets us grow
our storage infrastructure as fast as our rapidly expanding VMware
environment.  With Scentsy’s extremely
fast growth the last three years, we require a powerful and agile solution to
meet the global demand for our business.

"Because our company is
growing so fast, there was no way we could deploy PCs to our employees fast
enough. With the best-in-class integration between VMware and VNX, I can stand
up 10 desktops in about 30 minutes, helping us deliver virtual desktops out to
our users much faster. In the physical world, that would have taken weeks."

"As a global company,
VDI’s give us more control and security compared to physical PC’s. We’ve seen a cost savings of 30-50% in
physical hardware costs and have reduced management time by hours each day. We can fix a patch on the backend of our
infrastructure in an hour for all of our VDI’s when it previously took us an
hour per physical PC."

"Since moving to EMC VNX,
performance on our virtual servers has increased by 30%. With FAST Cache and FAST VP we can maintain
peak performance even during busy usage periods."

"With Avamar, we now
complete full backups every night, including our virtual desktops and virtual
machines. Before, it would take a whole day just to back up one server, but
with Avamar, it takes just a few hours for everything. All in all, Avamar
provides umbrella coverage for our entire environment, intuitive management,
and quick recoveries."